Brecht and Breaking Bad
Felt compelled to write this after watching Season 2 of Breaking Bad. Spoilers Alerts! Walter White knocks out the cardboard panel that holds the backdoor together and creeps into the bedroom, calling Jesse’s name and shaking him trying to wake him. Jane rolls onto her back. Walter sits on the edge of the bed in disgust/disappointment and examines the syringe the comatose youngsters just used. Jane sputters and chokes vomit into the air violently. Walter rushes to her with the impulse to flip her on her side so that she can vomit without asphyxiating—a safety precaution he spoke about earlier in the episode when tending to his newborn daughter—but stops. Rather than help Jane, he covers his own mouth and watches her choke and die. The scene ends as Walter stares off, his eyes full of tears. This scene calls into question my belief that people are good. However, something is signified here that is central to the importance of Breaking Bad. Bertolt Brecht, seeking a style of theater that could be entertaining as well as politically and socially significant, often wrote characters that do the opposite of what an audience wants them to do. Mother Courage is still capitalizing on the war, though it has taken all of her children. His characters do stupid and immoral things that make me furious. Brecht sought this reaction from his audience, believing that this outrage motivates social action. Taking Brecht as a starting point, we can see Walter White as an indictment of a human feeling/action of self-preservation. For Walter it is at any cost, and the audience is meant to see it as a kind of old American, conservative ideal: masculine, a guardian of social norms, a believer of the infallibility of money, someone who wants no charity from nobody nohow etc. Walter sees life as a constant war. Looking at him like Brecht, we can recognize the ideal as wrong. Frequently presented with kindnesses, Walter never fails to turn them down or distort them into villainies. To Walter, doing the right thing means every man for himself. When Junior (Flynn) makes the website for him, Walter is confused. His moral system doesn’t allow for other people to be good. It also doesn’t allow for an invention like the internet and the possibilities for social connectivity there. I think old-timers are justified in their distrust of the internet, Facebook, Twitter, etc. because it is the killing stroke to minding your own beeswax. Savewalterwhite.com is worse than the most heinous of all charities because it makes it so easy to help another human being. Someone you don’t even know, no less! Walter’s internal conflict of those Savewalterwhite.com scenes is this: How am I supposed to be praised for doing everything my own way with my own gumption with all these people helping me? The scenes are Brechtian because rather than take comfort in other people’s kindnesses and his family’s love (what the audience craves), Walter finds a way to launder his drug money using the website. He always does the unexpected, most awful thing imaginable that makes you say “Jesus Christ, really?” Most importantly I would like to debunk this myth that he does everything for his family, which is the excuse one might have for him being the devil. An important scene to consider when thinking about this is when he shows his baby the stacks of money hidden in the garage and says, “Look what Daddy did.” Like the proud toddler who brings his mother into the bathroom to look at the shit he just made in the toilet. In fact, we can equate the toddler shit to the meth to the money to the baby, they’re all products of animal desires. He is a kind of masculine ideal: he shits gold and he has babies. Getting money is an animal urge and for Walter, supporting his family is a rationalization for bad behavior. The audience should not adopt it. We should see it as a human social disease that desperately needs constant attention and treatment. In this regard, however, the show does something to bolster the audience’s sympathies for Walter’s point of view, and hopefully by putting words to it I can shine a disintegrating light on those sympathies and burn them away. The separate units of the White family support Walter’s belief that he and he alone can make things happen. Meaning family members serve as symbols for Walter of a larger social makeup and inadequacy. His son, standing for the younger generation, has cerebral palsy and is therefore physically ill-equipped for battle. He also has too many friends and uses the internet. His wife, standing for women, is pregnant, therefore also physically ill-equipped, but is also victim to her emotions and desires (i.e. cigarettes and her boss Ted). Walter can’t trust her to see the big picture and the value of the money because she will be too upset by the truth. She’s too grossed-out by wrongdoing. His sister-in-law, also standing for women but also standing for the extended family unit, is even more emotional, and it turns out sees a shrink. And his brother-in-law is an authority figure, he stands for the government which is an absolute evil (government tries to organize people, other people are bad, not trustworthy). He also talks too much and is dumb. His partner Jesse, standing for a less-young generation, something closer to Walter himself, is a drug addict, a wimp, a high-school dropout, sometimes homeless, an artist, the list goes on. The audience sees Walter as the only strong, rational, and intelligent person in ABQ. And he’s dying of cancer! However, rather than say “Well, then, of course he has to provide for his family anyway he can,” we should forgive all these other people their sins and ask, “Why doesn’t Walter get his head out of his ass and see things as they are instead of as less good than him?” If life is a war then Jane is a necessary casualty. She was taking Jesse away and fucking up business. Her death is to teach Jesse that drugs are not for taking, but for selling to people weaker than you. The show is entertaining and good enough to not simplify and moralize (like I’m probably doing) but to confront Walter and the audience in a more poetic way: Jane’s father, an air-traffic controller, distraught over her death, accidentally causes (manifests?) two planes to collide right above Walter’s house, and all the bits and pieces rain down. We can choose to see it in many ways, but here are a couple: Walter might view it as a sign of man’s incompetence and proof that when two foreign bodies come together things get destroyed. I see it like this: all actions have consequences, and no amount of lying or evasion will save you from the human remains that rain from the sky. The question certainly requires more research/textual evidence/thought.